ONE
Re-Kindling the Passion
Originally published February 2011
I’ve realised over the years that publishable quality does not equal commercial viability. In other words, it doesn’t matter how well you can write or how good your story is, unless a publisher can directly equate your potential book to sales – lots of sales – then a debut author doesn’t stand a chance in the 21st century. It’s a hard lesson to learn when you’ve written for pleasure since primary school and when all you’ve ever wanted to be is a “published” writer.
But what if the story you have to tell doesn’t fit the industry definition of commercial viability? There is the small-press – independents have flourished in the era of print-on-demand, since short print runs can be affordable and even profitable with low overheads. There’s also the DIY approach – if you have the money and simply want a real book in your hands that you can give to family and friends, then as long as you go in with your eyes open, I don’t see any harm. And now there is e-publishing.
My dad bought me a kindle a couple of weeks ago. My husband and teenage daughter are really rather unimpressed. “Does it play games?” No. “Can you get on facebook?” No. “Is it colour?” No. And off they go to get out the Wii. But for me, it means I have access to lots of books I’d never really considered reading before. For the first time, I can read what I choose, rather than what a publishing industry gatekeeper has chosen for me. Of course, there may be – and very often is – a lack of quality. Many of these books haven’t been edited and it’s true that anybody can upload pretty much anything. But I can read a free sample first and a lot of kindle books are less than a pound to buy, so what have I really lost if I come across a bad apple? I’ve paid £6.99 for paperbacks before now and not been able to finish them. And some of my friends who are writers and have never managed to secure that elusive contract are right up there near the top of the kindle best-sellers lists.
Then last week, I had an epiphany of sorts. What was to stop me from following this route? After many years of being told I can write but I’m not commercial or marketable, why couldn’t I produce an e-book? No cost outlay, no overheads – nothing to lose. I could either leave my story languishing on the hard disk of my computer or I could e-publish. Put-up or shut-up as the saying goes. So I did. Amazon’s kindle format seems to be the market leader at the moment so I decided to go that route – I may try other formats at some point. I have no interest as yet in self-publishing in hardcopy – hey, I’m still the eternal optimist that somebody may want to buy those rights! But I asked an incredibly talented friend to design me a cover, threw it all together in a word document, agonised over styles, bookmarks and hyperlinks, set up an account with Amazon and finally pushed the button.
I don’t write chick-lit or other fluffy stuff. I do write fantasy (a different story for other websites), but this book is crime. Not whodunit police-procedural, but more will-they-survive psychological thriller. It’s not nice and it’s not pretty. Very few of my work colleagues know I have a secret life as a writer and even my parents have no idea what I write about. They will now. And now it’s up to the readers – they will decide if they want to pay for my books. If they like them then hopefully they'll leave some good reviews and tell their friends. If they don't, well I'm no worse off than I was before, am I?
Let’s see what happens.
TWO
All About Ebooks
Originally published March 2011
Six weeks into this ebook experiment and I’ve learned a few things:
Edit, edit and edit some more. There are some shockingly bad ebooks out there. You may have seen the book review blog that went viral recently, where some poor woman criticised a reviewer for picking up on bad grammar. Rather than saying thank you and uploading corrections – or at least making a quiet and dignified exit – she stood her ground and insisted she was right, before descending into unpleasantness. Bad move. All publicity is most definitely not good publicity, although I’m sure the reviewer’s blog has a lot more followers now than it did before.
Keep the price low. Amazon’s 70% royalty rate may look attractive, but 70% of low sales is generally less than 35% of better sales. There is an argument that says everything is worth what you pay for it and there are readers who think cheap books will automatically be rubbish. But on the other hand there are a lot more readers out there who simply won’t pay paperback prices for an unknown author. 70p is about the lowest you can price on Amazon.co.uk, depending on the $ exchange rate, as it’s pegged to the lowest price of 99c on the US Amazon.com site – for this price, many readers will take a chance. And you still make 35%.
Edit. Did I say that already? Send your book in html format to your kindle and this is how it will appear to buyers. Play with the layout until it looks right. Resist the temptation to overload the front of your book with dedications, quotes and reviews – not only does it look amateur, it will cut into the % of free sample readers can download before they buy, and nobody will buy a book when the free sample consists of what your dad and Auntie Mabel thought.
Network. You have to let the world know your baby has been born. Join discussions on Amazon.co.uk and Amazon.com. Promote other people’s books – be generous. It’s all karma. Join the kindleboards forum, goodreads, facebook groups – anywhere to spread the word. Get involved in conversations but resist the temptation to yell ME, ME, ME at every opportunity. Once a day is enough. I did a promotional event at work recently with a few other writers. I work in a police headquarters (appropriate for a thriller) and we had a stand in the canteen with books for sale. Even though I only had some rather naff cards with a url on, I made an impression. Work colleagues got interested, my blog got more hits and I sold more books. The downside is that half my office is whispering about me and the other half just think I’m weird!
But getting reviews is wonderful. Getting 5 star reviews from complete strangers is simply awesome. They have nothing to gain or lose from being honest and no vested interest in being nice. This is why we write – not to make money (though it would help), but to be read by people other than friends and family. There are people out there who I have never met and don’t know me, who have bought my book, read it and liked it enough to leave me amazing comments. How cool is that?
THREE
To market, to market…
Originally published April 2011
Never judge a book by its cover. But when you see a list of possibly thousands of books and all you can see is a thumbnail picture, how else can you judge what is worth perusing further? In a virtual world, there is no bookshelf, no shop, no physical caressing of a book – checking the blurb, feeling the thickness, maybe reading the first paragraph – all you have to go on is that tiny picture.
So make it count. Make that thumbnail image as enticing as you possibly can. You want your prospective customer to click on it to get to your blurb or description. Spend some time in a real bookshop if you can find one these days. The supermarket will do, but it won’t give the range and variety of books. Look at the best-sellers shelves. What works? What makes you want to pick the book up? Look at the way different genres are packaged. How does chick-lit differ from – say – Martina Cole? Then you need to find a cover image that works as a thumbnail as well as at paperback size, so anything fussy or too detailed is out. Your aim is to make your cover fit in enough so it’s familiar to a buyer who reads that genre, but stand out enough from the others to be noticed. My original cover was done by a talented friend of mine. It looked fabulous at book size, but at thumbnail size, the detail disappeared and it stopped working. I have a new cover that was designed by a professional book cover designer and I’m really pleased with it. It’s modern, commercial and says what I want it to say.
With the best cover you can give it, how do you get people to see it? Now here you would think an ebook is at a disadvantage – after all you have no physical shelf space to loiter in. But in some ways you may actually be better off than a traditionally-published book, whose shelf-life might quite literally be measured in weeks before it’s consigned to the dumper bins of history for evermore. The shelf space you’re aiming for with an ebook (at least one published on kindle) is the Amazon listing, where your book will stay as long as it is selling enough to remain there. This where tagging comes in – add tags to your book that will help readers find it amongst all the other books – my book is tagged with key words like “thriller”, “crime”, “drugs” and “heroin”. If your readers also tag your book, it will start showing up in lists according to the tags, once you reach the top 100 in any category.
Amazon ranks are calculated hourly, I believe, so if all your friends and family want to buy your book, co-ordinate it and get them all to buy at the same time. With any luck your book will shoot up the ranks. Not that it’s something I’ve been able to do since my family don’t read my writing. Sometimes life would be so much easier if I wrote chick-lit, but it wouldn’t be half as much fun.
FOUR
A Tortoise Crime Wave
Originally published July 2011
FIVE
The Power of Advertising
Originally published October 2011
When we watch television – anything other than the good old BBC – we are constantly bombarded with advertising. Buy this body spray and every woman will fancy you. Buy this loaf of bread and your husband will eat it all and you’ll ruin his shirt. Buy these vegetables and your kids will be the brainiest in their class. Even online, it’s constant and apparently tailored specifically for me – how does Facebook know to advertise credit cards, online gambling and recipes on my page? Where does it get this information? I haven’t even bought a lottery ticket for over a year and as those who know me will verify, I’m not exactly Nigella Lawson (in the kitchen or anywhere else). Recently Facebook went through a spate of showing me adverts asking me if I knew where my teenage children were and did I know they might be taking drugs. Now, I have a fifteen year-old and it does make me wonder exactly how much online activity is logged and stored away for future reference. I’m fairly sure she’s not taking drugs …
But advertising can be powerful. When I first published my psychological thriller Hamelin’s Child back in February, I took a out a small ad on one of the ebook review sites. It didn’t generate much in the way of extra sales, so I thought I’d try one more. I went with EReader News Today and took out a book-of-the-day sponsorship for $25 in early June. The first available date was end of October so I sent my links, paid my money and promptly forgot about it.
My sponsorship went live on October 26th. It’s a US site, so I’m not sure of the timing, but when I came home from work, there was no change. Out of idle curiosity I checked again an hour later and I’d sold over 80 books. Another hour and the total had passed 100. My amazon.com ranking peaked at 180 (from somewhere in the many, many thousands) and I’ve made nearly 400 sales that I can directly attribute to this one advert. And sales are still trickling in – probably after the free sample has been read.
Not a bad investment of $25.
SIX
Realistic Research
Originally published November 2012
SEVEN
Sequel Power
Originally published February 2013
EIGHT
Bad Boys Rock
Originally published May 2014
NINE
Outside my Comfort Zone
Originally published January 2015
